In 1992, Momentum Health began life as a startup specialist health insurance company. To develop its IT systems in record time, it chose the Magic rapid application and deployment (RADD) environment.
Six years later, Momentum Health is migrating to Oracle on Sun Solaris and it is still running those Magic-based core systems.
"We began life in January 1993 with 200 principal lives and a monthly premium bill of R100 000," recalls John Robertson, director for IT at Momentum Health. "Our January 1998 figures were 120 000 principal lives and a monthly premium bill of R100 million. Magic has coped and evolved with this growth, although we have grown so quickly that none of the applications written then bears any resemblance to those running today."
Magic is distributed in South Africa by Exsol, a company in the MGX Holdings group.
Today Momentum Health`s largest Magic-based system supports more than 500 concurrent users, making it one of the largest Magic applications in the world.
"This system suports all core functions," Robertson emphasises, "embracing policy administration, premium collection, claims assessing and payment, commission and reinsurance. Initially we ran all these applications in a single environment, but it`s become too huge for that."
Now Momentum Health is converting from C-ISAM to Oracle. The conversion began in May and is scheduled for completion by September.
"One of the initial attractions for us with Magic was that we were told it was portable across databases and environments. This has proven to be the case, but not without performance issues," comments Robertson.
Other benefits, says Robertson, are reduced maintenance, shortened maintenance and, accordingly, lower costs than other application development platforms.
"All of this makes it easier for Momentum Health to change its systems in line with business needs," Robertson says. "We can develop new life systems quickly and easily, allowing the business to stay ahead of the industry."
Momentum Health is considering object technology to boost its speed of application development even further. The Magic applications would still fit in with the new systems, Robertson advises.
"In an object environment, we would simply treat certain of the existing Magic applications as objects."
Momentum Health started life with a Novell network running Btrieve on a very small network. This was cheap, portable and fast and a suitable entry point. Expansion requirements took Momentum Health to C-ISAM on SCO Unix, and now Oracle on Sun Solaris.
"As a pioneering user, we have pushed Magic to its absolute limits in terms of functionality," concludes Robertson.
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